The purpose of this 3-D numerical simulation is evaluate the application of a commercial CFD code to predict 3-D flow characteristics of wind turbine. The experimental approach, which has been main method of investigation, appears to be its limits, th...
The purpose of this 3-D numerical simulation is evaluate the application of a commercial CFD code to predict 3-D flow characteristics of wind turbine. The experimental approach, which has been main method of investigation, appears to be its limits, the cost increasing disproportionally with the size of the wind turbines, and is hence mostly limited to observing the phenomena. Hence, the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques and Navier-Stokes solvers are considered a very serious contender. The flow solver CFX-TASCflow is employed in all computations presented in this paper. The 3-D flow separation and the wake distribution of 2 bladed Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs) are compared to Heuristic model and visualized result by NREL(National Renewable Energy Laboratory). Simulated 3-D flow separation structure on the rotor blade is very similar to Heuristic model and the wake structure of the wind turbine is good agree with visualized results.